Kevin Spacey: Power Broker of the Year 2013

He's got two Oscars, he's got his own theater company, and he's probably a knight or something. (No? Not a knight? Okay: not yet.) But the fact is, it's been too long since we've had a fresh reason to love Kevin Spacey. This year, he gave us a great one: On Netflix's House of Cards, he plays a congressman so conniving, so cutthroat, so nakedly, devilishly power-hungry, it's hard to believe he's not a real politician

Kevin Spacey says that he was once ambitious, but that was a long time ago.

"Eleven or so years before American Beauty came out"—so around 1988, when he was just shy of 30—"I put on some very serious blinders and I got on the horse and I galloped toward seeing whether I could build a film career for myself. And you know, when you do something like that, have a certain kind of ambition that is very singular and very much about yourself, it is an incredibly selfish twelve years. Now, I’m not saying that everything I did was selfish or that I was only playing roles that drove that, but I was on a kind of mission to see if I could achieve something. To achieve a career at a certain level and in the way in which I wanted to have a career, playing with the kind of people I wanted to play with. I wanted to play in a certain league."

The biggest league?

"Sure. It’s like sports. You play tennis, you want to win Wimbledon, you want to win the U.S. Open."

Spacey won two Oscars—for The Usual Suspects and American Beauty—but he says that by the time he accepted an offer to run the Old Vic theater in London in 2003, that initial burst of ambition was spent. "I’d achieved it," he says. "I didn’t want to spend ten years pursuing the same dream. And I certainly didn’t want to spend ten years showing up in a lot of movies I probably shouldn’t have done, for money. So I took a left turn. It’s the best decision I ever made." (He is still there, overseeing and programming the theater—he has announced that he will leave in 2015. Most years he’s also appearing in productions himself: "No matter how good you might be in a movie, you’ll never be any better. But in a play, I can be better next Tuesday. That’s the thrill of it.")

But of course it’s not as though Spacey completely turned his back on the screen, and this year he has surfaced with his most mesmerizing character in a long while: the deliciously conniving southern puppet-master congressman Frank Underwood in House of Cards. Spacey is resistant to any compliment about how well he channels malice and deceit. "I’m just fucking happy to have a great job," he says. "I think people love it when anybody acts bad; it’s not particular to me." It’s as though he senses, within such compliments, a slight—one that reduces a complex character portrayal down to a few melodramatic personality traits, and one that belittles the expansive scope of a long and eminent career. But it is belittling nothing to note that, among his many other skills, Spacey is a master of intermittently repressed malevolence: Each time his eyes gleam and flicker, you wonder how bad what happens next may turn out to be.

House of Cards has reunited Spacey with David Fincher, who directed Spacey in one of the great roles of his ambition years, as the serial killer in Se7en. (More recently Spacey was also a producer of Fincher’s The Social Network.) "I suppose one of the reasons I love working with Fincher so much is because it’s like working with somebody with an X-Acto blade," Spacey says. "He just manages to get rid of all the shit and all the crap and all the fat and all the things you can bring to something. When you’re just able to distill it down to the idea and the feeling that a character is experiencing in a scene, it can become very, very razor sharp and really clean and really efficient and simple. And sometimes it takes twenty-five years to learn how to be simple."

I mention the way some people over the years have struggled under the weight of how Fincher does this. Usually they rail about the endless takes, Fincher relentlessly demanding an actor to play the same scene over and over. But Spacey sees reason in what Fincher does. "Anytime someone can beat the acting out of someone else, I think it’s a wonderful thing," he says. "Including myself."

With House of Cards, Spacey has also found himself the figurehead for a metamorphic moment in popular culture: fronting the first landmark, Emmy-nominated television series not to appear on either broadcast or cable TV. It was an opportunity he and David Fincher stumbled upon as they courted possible partners—not only did Netflix reportedly give them $100 million (for twenty-six episodes), but, says Spacey, it was the only suitor not to demand a pilot first. The fear was that no one would notice, "that we could have been the big bang that nobody heard around the world." But as it happened, pretty much everyone seemed to hear. "We’re over the moon," he says. (He now hopes they will continue after the second season: "I’m up for it if they’re up for it.")

Netflix releases no data on how many people have watched the show, but Spacey implies that it does share it with him—"I’m probably about as up-to-date on that information as I could be"—and mentions that House of Cards became the most-streamed show in all forty countries where Netflix exists. He considers what it’s done "in some ways a new paradigm," but although he expresses enthusiasm about the new form of audience consumption it allows—binge-watching on the first viewing of a TV series—he is dismissive of the idea that it might come to affect the creative content of programs themselves. "That camera doesn’t know it’s a film camera or a TV camera or a streaming camera," he says. "It’s just a camera."

Spacey tells me that, these days, "I don’t even think in terms of ambition." But everyone has something he wants, and Spacey is only human. For a long time now, for instance, it had disappointed him that he had evidently never even been considered for a Woody Allen movie. So many of his peers had taken their turns, but never him. Bear in mind now that Spacey’s general philosophy when it comes to getting roles is that pride should not get in your way. "I believe this: If an actor wants a role or wants to work with somebody, then you do everything within reason to try to get that role. If they want you to audition, you audition. If they want you to screen-test, you screen-test. If they want you to come and tap-dance in their hallway, you tap-dance in their hallway."

And so it was in that spirit, earlier this year, that Spacey—acknowledging to himself that Woody Allen’s unbroken silence on the possibility of casting Kevin Spacey in his movies was something that depressed him—decided it was time to do something about it.

"I wrote him a letter," Spacey explains, "and introduced myself as an actor he may or may not know. And I sent him a Netflix subscription, because I want him to watch my work."

Happily, Spacey says, this letter met with a positive response—"an absolutely wonderful letter" is how he describes Allen’s reply—in which Allen has let him know that he is "in contention for things in the future," and also took the time to thank Spacey for the Netflix subscription.

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